Lara, by Anna Pasternak (Ecco). This history explores the affair between the author’s uncle Boris Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya, the inspiration for the character of Lara in his novel “Doctor Zhivago.” It’s a largely unknown story: the author says that her family “repressed” it for a long time, because Pasternak had a wife, whom he didn’t like but wouldn’t leave, just as he wouldn’t leave Soviet Russia, despite fearing for his life. His somewhat baffling sense of loyalty was mirrored by Ivinskaya’s; she received punishments that Stalin was loath to dole out to Pasternak, doing two stints in the Gulag. The author confesses to being “frustrated” on Ivinskaya’s account: had Pasternak married her, he might have prevented her incarceration. By the end of this riveting, tragic tale, it’s hard not to share the sentiment.
The Chaos of Empire, by Jon Wilson (Public Affairs). This sweeping history of British colonial India rejects nostalgic portrayals of pomp and ceremony, arguing that the imperialists never stopped feeling vulnerable—hence their vengeful violence in the face of dissent. This almost psychoanalytic approach underplays complex power dynamics between the colonizers and the colonized. But the book has memorable accounts of how railways and canals reshaped, and often deformed, Indian landscapes and social norms, and of the acquiescence, collaboration, or resistance of local élites. Stories of colonial tax collectors and judges in small towns scattered throughout India are also moving. Their lives were lonely, and their children’s graves carry inscriptions that suggest “distance and failure.”
Something in the Blood, by David J. Skal (Liveright). This biography of Bram Stoker, the author of “Dracula,” gives his life a context in the social developments of the time. Born in Dublin, he suffered a mysterious paralysis as a boy but grew up to be athletic. His writing took him into the orbit of men like Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, and Hall Caine, who influenced both his work and his struggle with homosexuality. In the background was London—a city of disease and murders, and perfect material for a mind inclined toward the gothic. Skal draws on vast research but admits that Stoker is elusive. Studying everything around him is the closest we can get to understanding him and his iconic tale.
The Adventures of Form and Content, by Albert Goldbarth (Graywolf). “We are compounded of halves,” Goldbarth writes, in this inventive essay collection crowded with doubles—“different stories” that “share a spine.” The life of Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, echoes that of John Keats; an ancient handprint in the Chauvet caves mirrors the final gesture of a dying friend of the author’s. Trying to understand our divided natures and the fusion of form and content in perfect works of art, Goldbarth covers subjects as varied as Catullus, science fiction, and the life of a professional escort. Formally, too, the book unites the “inescapable halves of a single being”: it’s a tête-bêche, two books printed as one, with two front covers, two beginnings, and two ends.
